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Saturday, March 9, 2019

If you want the unvarnished truth, the economy’s rate of growth slowed surprisingly sharply in the second half of last year. If you prefer titillating silliness, we’ve entered a “per capita recession”.

The national accounts for the December quarter, issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this week, show real gross domestic product growing by only 0.2 per cent during the quarter, following growth of only 0.3 per cent in the September quarter.

That compares with growth in the first half of 2018 of 0.8 in the June quarter and 1.1 per cent in the March quarter. Six months ago, it looked like the economy was moving into top gear. Now we realise it was changing down.

You’d think that would be bad enough for those tireless in their search for bad news. But, no, they delved around in the fine print and discovered that real GDP per person actually fell by 0.2 per cent in the December quarter and by 0.2 per cent in the previous quarter.

So, that must mean we’re in a “GPD per capita recession”. Eureka! Much scarier. (And saying it in Latin rather than English makes it even more so.)

Making it more entertaining obscures the truth, of course, but you can’t have everything.

Speaking of truth, let me give you a tip: any “recession” that has to be qualified by an adjective ain’t the real deal.

The more excitable end of the economy-watchers – the financial markets and the media – is always looking for an excuse to shock mum by using the ultimate in economic bad language, the r-word. Over the years they’ve given us “technical” recessions, “manufacturing” recessions, “growth” recessions and now “per capita” recessions.

There is no science behind the notion that two successive quarters of “negative growth” – contraction – equal a God-given licence to use the r-word. It’s no more than a rule of thumb, whose one virtue is that it allows the over-excitable to shout Recession! within seconds of seeing a new set of figures, when they really should look and wait for more convincing information.

It’s no more than circumstantial evidence, when you can’t find the body or the murder weapon. No economist I know is comfortable with it as a way of judging whether we really are in recession.

What they know is that, as a test, it delivers too many false readings. Because it’s so arbitrary, it can tell you you’ve got a recession when you don’t, or tell you you don’t when you do.

The national accounts’ first stab at measuring the growth during a quarter is so rough and ready, and will be changed so many times before it stabilises, that two successive negative quarters can easily be revised out of existence.

The real world is too messy for such simple rules of thumb to be reliable.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg tweeted that “in 2000 and 2006 the Howard government had consecutive quarters of negative GDP per capita growth, and Rudd and Gillard had five negative quarters”.

And all this while our record period of continuous economic growth – now up to 27 years – remained unbroken. See what I mean about false positives?

But even if you do use the successive-quarters test, you’re supposed to apply it to the whole economy, not just to the bit that happens to qualify.

That’s why Scott Morrison was justified in dismissing the “per capita recession” as “made-up statistics”. The figures may have been calculated by the bureau, but it didn’t say anything about recession. That notion was spread by the media.

The bureau calculates about eight different versions of GDP (page 21 of the release). The excitables ignored the six that didn’t show two successive minuses, and zeroed in on one of the two that did. It was a contrivance in search of a headline.

The various versions of GDP are calculated to answer different questions. GDP per person is not designed to tell us whether we’re in recession. It’s designed to show how much of the growth in the economy is coming just from population increase rather than rising prosperity.

Making it a useful indicator. For instance, Frydenberg boasted that “Australia continues to grow faster than all of the G7 nations except the United States”.

True, but GDP per person tells us why. It’s because our population’s growing so much faster than theirs. (Of course, if you’re looking for a job, the growth caused by a higher population should make it easier.)

Admittedly, GDP per person is often used as a measure of what’s happening to the standard of living. But it’s a terribly crude measure. Which is why economists agree that one of the other measures, “real net national disposable income per person”, is the best you’ll get just by modifying GDP itself.

Trouble is, it shows the income of households growing by 0.8 per cent in December and by 2.1 per cent over the year. Wouldn’t get a headline out of that.

Time for a reality check: why is it that the r-word strikes fear into the minds of ordinary people? Because they know that genuine recessions involve falling employment and rapidly rising unemployment. Businesses fail, people lose their jobs, and the rest of us fear we’ll be next.

Any sign of that happening? No. The reverse, in fact. Using the bureau’s “trend” (smoothed) figures, over the six months to December, employment increased by 175,000, with 87 per cent of the extra jobs being full-time, and the proportion of people aged 15 and over with jobs at a record 62.4 per cent.

The unemployment rate fell by 0.3 percentage points to 5.1 per cent and the under-employment rate fell 0.2 points 8.7 per cent.